Appeal No. 2004-2258 Application 10/145,543 specification indicates that such tables are “typically stored on random access storage devices...such as magnetic or optical disk drives for semi-permanent storage.” The instant invention seeks to take such a large database table and place it within memory. Therefore, the in-memory database table of the instant claims must be capable of at least semi-permanent storage. The mapping in Pereira does not constitute data, and the data that is using the mapping table is clearly not in “semi-permanent storage,” as apparently required by the instant claims, because any data using the mapping table of Pereira is fleeting data; it is not stored “semi-permanently” and may not be considered to be “data in an in-memory database table,” as claimed. Moreover, in our view, the examiner has not provided sufficient motivation for combining the applied references. The examiner appears to have picked and chosen various references based on a word search, finding “received property search requests” in Wittgreffe (column 3, line 62), “to retrieve the specified number of rows starting at or near the row...” in Peltonen (column 18, lines 54-56), “a signed number of rows to return” in Peltonen (column 16, line 37), “locate the qualified data objects” in Hooper (column 7, lines 45-46), and “mapping can be stored in the form of a table in the DBMS, in memory” in Pereira (column 9, lines 63-65), and then simply declaring that it would have been obvious to combine the teachings of these references because they all “teach the use of databases with tables and Hooper and Pereira use in-memory access to data” (answer-page 5). This conclusion of obviousness based on the commonality of certain elements is 8Page: Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 NextLast modified: November 3, 2007